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If aliens exist, how can we communicate with them?

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If we send a message, what should it say?

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How should we send it?

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Two familiar organizations have pledged to scour the vast regions of space

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for signs of extraterrestrial life.

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But if it takes hundreds, thousands, even millions of years for light

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from distant stars to reach Earth,

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how long could it take for an alien to answer our calls?

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Are aliens contacting us right now?

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Join us as we investigate how scientists are sending and receiving alien communications.

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A global effort has begun.

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Secret files hidden from the public for decades.

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Detailing every UFO account are now available to the public.

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We are about to uncover the truth behind these classified documents.

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Find out what the government doesn't want you to know.

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Unseal alien files.

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Exposing the biggest secret on planet Earth.

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For thousands of years, we have wondered if we are alone in the universe.

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Today, we may have the technology to answer the question.

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But the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence began in the late 1950s

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with the birth of SETI.

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SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

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And these are radio astronomers who believe that if there are civilizations out there,

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the best way to detect them will be listening for radio signals

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that they've either sent inadvertently just through things like television and radio like we have,

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or as a deliberate attempt to try to make contact.

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Communicating with aliens is their prime goal,

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and they regularly listen for and send messages in the hopes of making contact.

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Their effort to try and detect radio waves is done through radio astronomy.

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There are very powerful radio telescopes here on Earth that essentially are tasked to scan the skies,

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look for some type of signal of some kind that differs from what you naturally see in the universe.

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But what is a radio wave? Why are they important? And where are they coming from?

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Everything that you see by looking up gives some type of radio wave or radio signature to it,

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and it's different across the board.

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A planet or an exoplanet is going to give off a different radio wave and radio signature

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than a quasar or a nebula or a galaxy.

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We are spinning through an infinite universe,

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so capturing the radio waves of an alien species is not as easy as it sounds.

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Unfortunately, it's like looking for a needle in a stack of needles.

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You have so many radio waves out there that are naturally occurring.

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You have to figure out which one sticks out that shows that it's intelligent.

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Celestial bodies with magnetic fields produce radio waves,

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and this electromagnetic radiation has different frequencies.

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Scientists can tell by looking at these different frequencies what these different objects are.

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Unsealed case file. The Erocebo message.

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November 16th, 1974. Where'd he go?

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In 1974, scientists developed a message or a radio signal that we were going to broadcast

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from the Erocebo radio telescope out into the cosmos in hopes that somebody was listening.

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This was the idea of the astronomer Frank Drake,

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and what he did is he used prime numbers to send a binary message.

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And actually, if you ever picked up this signal,

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you could decide to decode it one of two ways, white, black, or black, white.

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The message depicts vital information about Earth.

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This was a diagrammatically representation of the Erocebo telescope itself,

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human beings, and again some basic information about planet Earth and life on Earth.

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The message is sent to a distant star cluster known as M13,

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but critics claim there is a problem with this methodology.

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We were going to beam this message to a star system that was 21,000 light years away.

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Just assume for a moment that somebody was listening,

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but we weren't going to know until 21,000 years later.

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Now that is a pretty long time to wait,

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but now add in the fact that they want to respond.

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It would take them 21,000 years to then beam that message,

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assuming that that will travel at the speed of light back to us.

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It will take a full 42,000 years to then just say hello.

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But there is another more disturbing reason that has some experts concerned.

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Many people at the time said that the Erocebo message was highly irresponsible.

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Indeed, the Astronomer Royal in the UK described it as a scientific suicide note,

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and he said that we ought not to be drawing attention to ourselves in this way

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and making ourselves known to civilizations that might be orders of magnitude

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more powerful than us and perhaps hostile.

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Scientists searching for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe

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are sending and listening to radio messages from deep space.

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But in the 1970s, leading astrobiologists of the day decide to try a different approach.

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Unsealed case file, Pioneer 10.

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March 2, 1972, Cape Kennedy, Florida.

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NASA launches the Pioneer 10 space probe.

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It's an historic event.

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Pioneer will become the first probe to travel the outer planets,

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the first to travel through the asteroid belt,

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and the first man-made object to enter interstellar space.

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But there is something else on board that is also a first.

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Scientists thought that it would be an interesting idea to place messages

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to civilizations that might one day encounter the spacecraft.

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Leading extraterrestrial scientists Frank Drake and Carl Sagan

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are given three weeks to come up with a plaque that is eventually attached to Pioneer 10.

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And so they created a plaque that was visual in nature,

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where it showed a human male and a human female.

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But also images that would say something about our civilization,

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technical information that would illustrate the position of our sun in the galaxy

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and additionally information about DNA and indeed early human development.

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So this was, to all intents and purposes, a message from humanity to the stars.

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Just five years later, NASA sends another probe,

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but this time with a recorded message.

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Unsealed case file, Voyager 1.

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September 5, 1977, Cape Canaveral, Florida.

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The Voyager program kind of took the next step in trying to communicate with aliens.

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Instead of a visual plaque like on the side of Pioneer, the Voyager had a golden record.

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These were in the form of records that one day perhaps alien civilizations might find and be able to play.

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And there were a series of images and sounds that really tried to summarize life on Earth.

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Voyager's golden record tries to encapsulate life on Earth and all of its biodiversity.

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And the intent with the Voyager record was essentially to give them a piece of us

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that they could hear who and what we were.

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They could essentially see who and what we were.

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They could understand the life that could be found here on planet Earth.

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They could find planet Earth.

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These were scenes from everyday life, music, but also just really, I suppose,

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a testament to planet Earth and the human race, who we are.

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But many in the space industry are uneasy that NASA is speaking for all of humanity.

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Some people say we shouldn't do it at all.

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That the universe might be a dangerous place and we ought not to advertise our presence to more advanced civilizations.

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Others consider arguments against broadcasting a message to be pointless

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because planet Earth is an already easily detectable civilization.

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If we send the message, what do we say?

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And indeed, who should say it?

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Who truly speaks for planet Earth?

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Should we send a simple greeting?

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Should we send an invitation to make contact?

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We're giving them a map to exactly where we are when essentially they could be malicious.

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They could be our enemy.

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And do we want to give a blueprint to our inner workings to our enemies here on Earth?

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Absolutely not.

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Well, with the plaque, with the Voyager record, with the messages beamed into space,

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that's essentially what we are doing.

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NASA is not the only organization attempting to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations.

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Other scientists have been sending physical and radio wave messages toward distant stars for decades.

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Scientists believe that radio waves are the best way to receive and perhaps even send messages between civilizations.

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Firstly, because they occur naturally.

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So it's a kind of logical thing to observe in the universe and then think, hey, we could use this.

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The critical point is that you can encode information in that way.

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But as scientists send messages to space, they also look for a response.

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Unsealed case file.

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The wow signal.

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August 15, 1977, Ohio State University, Big Ear Telescope.

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Possibly the best evidence ever of an alien civilization came in 1977 when radio astronomers at the Big Ear Telescope detected a signal which seemed to have all the characteristics that scientists said an artificial signal should have.

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It wasn't during the time that scientists were actually looking at the screens.

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This was at a time that was considered downtime.

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It was in the middle of the night and scientists noticed it the next morning.

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At 11.16 p.m., Big Ear records a signal 30 times louder than naturally occurring signals.

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After 72 seconds, it abruptly stops.

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The astronomer who was on duty when this was first detected was so stunned by this that he wrote in pen on the computer printout.

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Wow exclamation mark in the margin.

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Because to him, this was exactly what SETI had been looking for.

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Now they tried to find it again.

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It did not repeat, which is what you want to see on an intelligent message.

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Now essentially they could have just beamed that message once and that was it and didn't repeat it.

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We don't know for sure.

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But this was something that piqued that scientist interest and it's kind of lived in SETI legend ever since.

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Does that mean that this was a signal not from an alien planet but from an alien spacecraft?

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And might that explain why it didn't repeat?

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Over the years, SETI has detected other promising signals.

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But so far, all attempts at decoding the alleged messages have turned up nothing.

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There was a similar incident in 2010 and this was dubbed the new wow signal.

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Now this signal looked like nothing that they had detected before.

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It was not easily discernible as a galaxy or nebula or pulsar or something that they could discount it as.

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So they tried to find it again.

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They searched the same area of sky in hopes that that signal was repeating.

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Unfortunately, it was not.

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The new wow signal is unique because it was discovered in a frequency range known for being quiet.

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There is a very quiet part of the spectrum, generally known as the water hole.

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And natural objects don't tend to radiate in those frequencies.

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So SETI scientists have said that if you wanted to listen out for a message,

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this would be a very obvious part of the spectrum to study.

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Finally, it appeared to emanate from very close to a nearby star,

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which some people say is perhaps home to a planet where there might be something in the so-called habitable zone.

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But critics say the new wow signal could have been emitted from one of our own satellites.

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We don't know if this was something that was detected on accident,

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that it may have been one of our signals that maybe had hit a satellite or bounced back to us.

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It's one thing to detect a signal and quite another to decipher it.

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To really figure out how we're going to talk to an extraterrestrial civilization,

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scientists are looking here on Earth and how life communicates.

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Some scientists are looking at the possibility of understanding language,

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if you can call it that, from whales and dolphins as a first step on the road to maybe deciphering an extraterrestrial language.

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But many experts believe that if we are going to understand an alien message,

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we will ultimately need some extraterrestrial help.

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If they wanted us to detect their signal and decode it, which surely they would,

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an alien civilization would I think want to make it easy for us.

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This isn't going to be a puzzle, so they're going to want to send us that Rosetta Stone.

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They're going to want to send us that primer.

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Scientists all over the world are actively searching the skies for alien civilizations.

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But why has there been no breakthrough communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence?

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In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope performed an astounding study.

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The Hubble trained its camera on a small pinpoint size spot in the sky that was essentially dark.

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Scientists believe that there was possibly nothing there.

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The Hubble Space Telescope's ultra-deep field study found an estimated 10,000 galaxies.

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When you look at the photographs and you understand just what you are looking at

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and how massive just that pinpoint is,

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you realize how astronomical, pardon the pun, our universe truly is.

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That proves beyond any shadow of a doubt, finding intelligent life in this universe is going to be nothing but luck.

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SETI scientists consider the apparent silence from the cosmos, not a sign of failure.

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It's exactly what they would expect, but the technology they say is now approaching the point

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where if there are civilizations out there, they would expect to pick them up within the next few years.

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But many scientists also contend that finding intelligent life in the universe

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probably means they will be more advanced than us.

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And that may be one of our biggest problems.

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There's an irony about a civilization that as it progresses, it might become not louder but more quiet.

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We see this with the transition from analog to digital technology.

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Actually digital produces far less of a radio signature that would be detectable across interstellar distances.

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Advanced alien civilizations may be hard to detect with conventional radio waves, unless, like us, they are trying to communicate on purpose.

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The logical beacon is a sequence of prime numbers.

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The chances of this occurring naturally are of course infinitesimally small.

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So if you pick up a radio signal that's a sequence of prime numbers, that screams to you, there's a civilization out there and they're trying to get our attention.

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Maybe one day in the not too distant future, one of our signals will be heard by an alien civilization.

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Critics of SETI say, come on, this is an organization packed with really super intelligent scientists.

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They've been looking for decades and they've found nothing.

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The search really has only just begun.