Message from a Star...

Our home is Epsilon Booetis, which is a double star. We live on the sixth planet of seven--check that, the sixth of seven--counting outwards from the sun, which is the larger of the two stars. Our sixth planet has one moon. Our fourth planet has three. Our first and third planet each have one. Our probe is in the orbit of your moon.

The words sound as if they come from a Star Trek script. In fact, says a serious young Scottish science writer and part-time astronomer named Duncan A. Lunan, they may well be true. Writing in Spaceflight, a publication of the British Interplanetary Society, Lunan, 27, says that the words are his translation of a message that may have been relayed to earth by a robot spacecraft from a highly advanced civilization far beyond the solar system. More astonishing, Lunan adds, the automatic vehicle may have been circling the moon for thousands of years, waiting patiently for earthlings to acquire the necessary know-how to contact it.

Lunan, whose article was the topic of a special meeting of the British Interplanetary Society in London last week, has reached back to the early days of radio for support for his contention. In the late 1920s, the Norwegian geophysicist Carl Stormer and a Dutch collaborator, Balthasar van der Pol, sent each other a number of short-wave radio messages. The purpose of the tests was to study a curious side effect. At times the radio signals were followed by mysterious echoes that were picked up as many as 15 seconds after the original transmissions. Indeed, the delays were so long that they could not be readily attributed to atmospheric quirks, magnetic storms or other natural phenomena. To this day, scientists have been unable to solve the mystery of the echoes.

In 1960 Radio Astronomer Ronald Bracewell of Stanford University offered a tantalizing hint. Speculating about the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy, he wrote in Nature that an advanced civilization might not necessarily use long-range radio signals to communicate with other intelligent beings. Such signals would be considerably weakened over interstellar distances. Instead, Bracewell said, those far-off beings might employ robot space probes as their message bearers. Sent to a promising nearby star, such a vehicle could swing into an orbit around it at approximately the right distance to encounter a planet with life-supporting temperatures. If it picked up telltale radio signals, the probe might then bounce them back to advertise its presence, thereby producing an effect like the echoes of the 1920s. Finally, as its first message, the robot might transmit a picture of the area of the heavens from which it came.

Intrigued by Bracewell's musings, Lunan searched back into the original reports published by Stormer and Van der Pol, who had kept records of the varying intervals between the original signals and their echoes. On the chance that these variations might represent a code, Lunan began to make graphs from them. He used one axis of the graph as a measure of the amount of time each echo was delayed. The other axis indicated the position of each echo in the sequence of echoes. Plotting the points determined by those coordinates yielded no recognizable pattern. But when Lunan reversed the axes, he got a striking result: a collection of dots that looked to him like a sky map of the constellation Booetis (pronounced boh-oh-tis). Only the star Epsilon Booetis (actually a double star system whose members are popularly called Izar and Pucherrima) was significantly out of place. But Lunan had a ready explanation for that displacement. He says that it may well have been the space probe's way of saying that Epsilon Booetis was its place of origin.

Encouraged by this somewhat flimsy evidence, Lunan plotted more radio echoes, including those reported by a French scientific expedition that went to Indochina in 1929 to observe an eclipse. These graphs not only showed the same constellation, but also indicated the number of planets around the probe's parent star. In fact, says Lunan, "the logical sequence" of one diagram is "so clear it can be represented in standard, even colloquial English." Unsatisfied with a simple translation, Lunan went on to more daring conclusions. He claims, for instance, that the constellation's brightest star, Arcturus, was slightly off to the side in roughly the place it occupied 13,000 years ago. For this too Lunan had a theory: that was the time when the probe arrived in the earth's vicinity and instructed its onboard equipment to scan the skies and draw up the star map. Lunan even speculates about the intelligent race that dispatched the probe: because their sun has now expanded into a hot ball of fire called an orange giant, they were not merely seeking contact with other creatures, but were actively looking for a new planetary home in more favorable surroundings.

Scientists are generally skeptical about Lunan's fantastic scenario. Says British Radio Astronomer Sir Martin Ryle: "Lunan gave no evidence, only beliefs." M.I.T. Physicist Philip Morrison, who believes in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, adds: "Chances are nine in ten the whole story is a hoax." Astronomer Bracewell himself doubts that the echoes were deliberate; he suspects that they were caused by a still-undiscovered natural effect in the atmosphere. Fanciful or not, Lunan's theory is not being dismissed altogether. At the London meeting, a leading British computer expert, Anthony Lawton, announced that Lunan's theory would soon be put to the test. For the next year, Lawton said, he will send off blip-like radio signals into space at regular 30-second intervals in hopes of stirring the putative probe into another response. As a precaution, however, he is keeping his operational frequency a highly guarded secret. Otherwise, he says, "someone might hoax the experiment right off."

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