Some misunderstandings can be remedied by a simple explanation. Others end friendships or marriages. The most frightening miscommunications are those between nuclear-armed superpowers. In October, 1962, near the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean was shaken by depth charges from a U.S. ship. Convinced that he was under attack, the submarine’s captain decided to fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo. His deputy officer, whose consent was required, refused. He believed that the depth charges were not an attack but a signal, at a moment when the submarine was too deep underwater to receive radio transmissions. As it turned out, the deputy officer was correct: the submarine had missed an announcement that the U.S. Navy would “induce” any vessel violating a recently imposed blockade of sea traffic to surface and identify itself. The Soviet officer’s caution prevented escalation into nuclear war.
This incident, which opens “Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain,” by the science historian Rebecca Charbonneau, is just one of the Cold War’s many bloodcurdling close calls. This was an era obsessed with signals and surveillance, but terrible at direct communication. Enmity and mistrust made open dialogue between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. nearly impossible. Even when one side spoke frankly, the other searched for hidden agendas and ulterior motives. Yet, with nuclear arsenals on either side, the stakes had never been so high.
These tense geopolitical circumstances engendered hopes for another kind of superpower communication: the exchange of messages between Earth and advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. A year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union had sent the first human to outer space. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s voyage was the greatest victory to date in the U.S.-Soviet space race, the less antagonistic cousin of the arms race between the two countries. This international rivalry generated a series of unprecedented efforts to make contact with extraterrestrials, led by scientists who dreamed of harmony on Earth and beyond.
As Charbonneau shows, the Cold War quest for extraterrestrial intelligence was as much about communicating with other humans as it was about looking for aliens. When the Soviet Union sent the first Morse code message to Venus, in 1962, it used frequency manipulation to spell out the Russian word for “peace,” followed by “Lenin” and “USSR.” Venusians were unlikely to make much of such a sequence; the Americans, on the other hand, got the point. But scientists interested in conveying less political concepts often found their attempts stymied. Getting messages across the Iron Curtain could be just as hard as sending them into space.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence relied on radio astronomy, a subdiscipline that examines the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum—light whose wavelength is too long to be visible to human eyes. The field was founded by the physicist and radio engineer Karl Jansky, who, in 1933, was working at Bell Labs when he began searching for the source of static that was disrupting telephone conversations. He located it in an unexpected place: the middle of the Milky Way.
Jansky’s work marked the beginning of the serious scientific study of radio waves in outer space. But the field did not become a research priority in the United States until the Second World War, when it was highly valued for its usefulness in jamming radar systems. The Cold War was a boom time for radio astronomers, whose huge telescopes were prized for their ability to monitor enemy communications and track missiles. Flush with funds, the discipline advanced rapidly. This was the beginning of a long entanglement between astronomy, the military-industrial complex, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Radio astronomy was still a nascent technology, however, and the continued scarcity of high-tech instruments prompted surprising episodes of international coöperation. In 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik, the first human-made satellite to orbit Earth. Only one radar facility in the West, the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, had a telescope with a steerable parabolic dish large enough to track the rocket that had launched the satellite. This was a source of great alarm to the U.S., since the launch rocket resembled an intercontinental ballistic missile with enough power to carry a hydrogen bomb. As the Earth turned and the rocket moved out of Jodrell Bank’s view, the U.S. could not take up the baton—and neither could the Soviets, who soon asked for help finding their own rocket. For years, the British observatory was in the strange position of monitoring both American and Soviet missile launches and space missions.
In 1963, the physicist Bernard Lovell, who had developed Jodrell’s immense telescope, was invited on a visit to the U.S.S.R.’s new radio-astronomy facility in Crimea. Lovell had helped confirm a Soviet triumph by locating Sputnik’s rocket, and now he was a celebrity in the Soviet Union. His scientific curiosity must have been intense: he was to become the first Westerner to visit the new observatory and gauge the extent of Soviet advances in radio astronomy. As British intelligence made clear, he was also expected to report back on what he saw to MI6.
The Soviets, too, tried to draw Lovell into intrigue. In Moscow, near the end of Lovell’s trip, the president of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. offered to build him a telescope even larger than the one at Jodrell Bank if he stayed in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a mysterious stranger had approached Lovell to ask for help arranging the defection of the brilliant, eccentric Iosif Shklovsky, a professor of astrophysics and a key figure in the Soviet space program. It was not clear to Lovell why Shklovsky might be in danger, and so he declined.
Caught in these political games, Lovell became intensely paranoid. He fell ill after returning to England, and grew convinced that the Soviets had made him sick by attempting to brainwash or even murder him, perhaps with the help of a telescope’s radar beam. He may have been influenced by the popular culture of the day: the film “The Manchurian Candidate” had come out the year before, featuring a plot that involved a Korean War veteran brainwashed by Communist captors and sent to assassinate the Presidential nominee of an American political party.
During the Cold War, the United States made a point of celebrating scientific freedom, but government-funded research was shaped by political priorities and new discoveries were swiftly put to military uses. In the Soviet Union, all research was completed under the auspices of the state. Scientific results that seemed to undermine the central tenets of Soviet politics had to be refuted, as, for example, when the field of classical genetics, with its emphasis on the determining powers of heredity, became taboo.
In the worst days of Stalin’s purges, in the nineteen-thirties, scientists had been among those arrested on trumped-up charges and imprisoned or executed. The “astronomers purge” began when an astronomy student failed his Ph.D. candidacy exam and denounced the professor who had administered the test. Under torture, the arrested astronomer confessed to a nonexistent counter-revolutionary conspiracy among his colleagues. An estimated ten to twenty per cent of the Soviet Union’s astronomers were swept up in the arrests that followed.
The political persecution of scientists continued after Stalin’s death, though with less lethal results. Those who spoke out in defense of human rights were often denied the privilege of travelling abroad. This was the case for Shklovsky, the physicist whom Lovell had been asked to help defect. In 1973, Shklovsky refused to sign a letter condemning Andrei Sakharov, a leading nuclear physicist turned human-rights defender, and wrote his own letter advocating for Sakharov. As a result, Shklovsky lost the right to attend international scientific meetings.
But ideology also gave the Soviets reason to believe in extraterrestrial civilizations, whose existence they hoped would unite the workers not only of the world but of the galaxy. In the nineteen-fifties, some Soviet astrobotanists argued that dialectical materialism dictated that extraterrestrial life must exist, since the absence of evidence of life on Mars or Venus would disprove communism’s philosophical basis. Such wishful thinking contributed to a dramatic false alarm, in 1962, when a Soviet reporter misunderstood a scientist’s remark and issued a telegram from the central news agency announcing that Soviet astronomers had received signals from outer space. The news caused a brief international sensation. After the announcement was debunked, the episode was used to discredit Soviet scientists, though it was the process of journalistic transmission that was most to blame.
Shklovsky was one of the leading figures in the Soviet search for extraterrestrial life. Known for both brilliant scientific advances and oddball theories, he repeatedly suggested that Phobos, one of Mars’s moons, was a hollow artificial satellite made by aliens. He was eager to share and debate his theories and findings with like-minded colleagues around the world—for instance, with the American astronomer Carl Sagan, perhaps the world’s highest-profile proponent of the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence. But, confined to the Soviet Union, Shklovsky struggled to communicate with his peers abroad. Mail to and from the U.S.S.R. was confiscated by the Soviets, and scientific results were heavily censored. Astronomers outside the U.S.S.R. had trouble confirming the findings of their Soviet counterparts, and legitimate discoveries were often dismissed by Westerners as hoaxes or errors.
Collaboration was even more fraught when astronomers and physicists were enlisted into spy games—a painful assignment for those who had sincere relationships with their colleagues and believed wholeheartedly in the objective nature of the scientific endeavor. In 1960, as a young man, Sagan met with a Soviet scientist visiting Los Angeles. After their meeting, Sagan was pumped for information by an Air Force intelligence officer masquerading as a translator. Eager to share his new discoveries, Sagan told the man everything, and was furious when he learned that he had been manipulated. The episode helped inspire Sagan’s vision of a search for extraterrestrial intelligence that would transcend national boundaries. He and his fellow radio astronomers, members of a discipline that lie at the heart of Cold War surveillance, dreamed of a better way of listening: one that promoted peace and coöperation rather than competition and subterfuge.
In 1971, scientists from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. hosted a joint conference on communication with extraterrestrial life which included discussion of building a radio telescope spanning the Israeli-Egyptian border. One hope in that era was that the search for extraterrestrial life could bring peace to the planet by allowing humans to perceive themselves as “earthlings” rather than citizens of different countries. Andrei Sakharov thought up a scheme that would send messages to extraterrestrials while also promoting nuclear disarmament: thermonuclear bombs could be detonated safely in space and double as “flashlamps” to transmit regular signals to aliens.
Détente, a process of softening U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations that Nixon initiated, was symbolized by the 1975 joint Apollo-Soyuz mission. In orbit, American and Soviet space capsules docked together. An American astronaut and a Soviet cosmonaut shook hands in space, and listened to the American rock-funk group War’s song “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” The Apollo blocked the Sun so that the Soyuz could photograph the solar corona. Before the mission, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had announced, “From outer space our planet looks even more beautiful. It is big enough for us to live peacefully on it.”
Yet earthling politics continued to trouble the search for alien life. Sagan was chair of a committee appointed by NASA to select sounds and images intended to represent Earth and humankind to inhabitants of other planets. The resulting Golden Records, which included Bach, Beethoven, and Chuck Berry, were sent on the interstellar Voyager probes. The Soviets were offended by the initial choice of “The Peddler,” a folk song about capitalist haggling, to represent Russian music; Sagan replaced it with a Georgian tune about rebelling against a landlord. Sagan’s plan to have a representative of every U.N. nation say “Hello” on a recording led to an unfortunate preponderance of male voices; the final version incorporated more women. Who had the right to speak on behalf of planet Earth? At times, it seemed that the era’s emerging “planetary consciousness” only brought divisions and inequities into higher relief. In the Golden Record’s final mix, the voices of the U.N. diplomats were blended with whale songs—an interspecies compromise.
A few years before, in the early nineteen-seventies, an attempt to create a non-nationalist message from earthlings to extraterrestrials had run into similar difficulties. Sagan and his wife, Linda Salzman Sagan, had designed a plaque, to be placed on NASA’s Pioneer probes, that depicted a hydrogen atom, a map showing the location of the Sun, a representation of the planets surrounding it, and a drawing of a naked man and woman. This last image posed a problem for NASA. The man on the plaque was deemed fit to go to space with clearly drawn genitals, but NASA removed the line representing the woman’s vulva. Feminists protested the desexing of a rare female emissary to the cosmos. Despite NASA’s edit, more puritanical members of the public complained that the U.S. was sending “smut” into space.
Charbonneau has a good eye for eccentric characters, who abound in this story. She details how the dustup over the Pioneer drawings inspired a memorable intervention by a charismatic artist named Joe Davis, a founder of “BioArt,” a movement that uses living matter as a means of artistic expression. Thanks to his formidable powers of persuasion, he talked the M.I.T. Center for Advanced Visual Studies into awarding him a fellowship, which he used to create a 1986 project called Poetica Vaginal. Davis, working with a crew of M.I.T. engineers, built a “vaginal detector”—a water-filled tube equipped with a device to measure pressure. Volunteers, many of whom were dancers with the Boston Ballet, “invaginated” the detector, which recorded their voices, heartbeats, and vaginal contractions. Electronic music software translated these contractions into harmonics matching the frequencies of human speech, and a linguist made the frequencies into an English phonetic map. M.I.T.’s radar transmitted the vaginal messages to the star systems Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. A colonel from the Air Force, which helped operate the radar, was furious when he found out about the project, twenty minutes into transmission. Six years later, the pop-psychology best-seller “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” would imagine men and women as inhabitants of different planets. Was there any hope of finding a common language with actual aliens?
And what if the aliens didn’t want to be friends? What if they didn’t like Bach or Chuck Berry? As radio astronomers faced persistent difficulties communicating across the Iron Curtain, Sir Martin Ryle, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, wondered whether it might be downright dangerous to send messages to space. What if extraterrestrials received them, showed up on Earth, and turned out to be belligerent, or hungry? American space exploration was often described with terms and metaphors rooted in colonialism: space was “the final frontier,” and first contact with extraterrestrials was sometimes imagined as something similar to early European encounters with Indigenous peoples. What if aliens proved just as untrustworthy as the colonists who had made first contact with the Native Americans?
The Second World War provided another alarming point of comparison. Could extraterrestrial contact lead to a war that engulfed not only the planet but the galaxy? Even when conflict remained earthbound, technological advances were closely linked to destruction. Jill Tarter, another astronomer, told Charbonneau that she once walked into Bernard Lovell’s office and found him weeping. He was looking at photos of Dresden, which had been devastated by bombing thanks in part to the radar Lovell had helped develop. The nuclear bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most glaring proof of how quickly scientific advances could be translated into mass death. Radio transmissions to distant parts of space could take decades to reach their objective. By the time extraterrestrials received our signals, would we have exterminated ourselves?
Our fantasies of aliens are all about us: our fears of annihilation, our hopes for salvation, and, of course, our difficulties in communicating with one another. In 1985, Ronald Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev whether, in the event of extraterrestrial invasion, the U.S.S.R. would rescue the U.S. “No doubt about it,” Gorbachev replied. The next year, the Soviet leader proposed a plan to abolish the world’s nuclear weapons by the end of the century. Soon, he had been deposed and the U.S.S.R. dissolved. In the Putin era, anxiety about nuclear war has returned to the headlines. Fears provoked by nuclear-armed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, prompted a wave of fantasies that aliens would come to save us. One tabloid suggested that a U.F.O. had destroyed Russian tanks. Looking to the heavens for salvation, some imagine not gods but aliens: a synonym for the divine.
Sagan, who devoted much of his life to seeking extraterrestrial intelligence, did not expect aliens to rescue us from ourselves. Searching the sky did not mean an abdication of earthly responsibilities. In a 1988 essay, he argued that, although the likelihood of alien invasion was low, humankind needed to band together against the threats it faced as a planet: the “unprecedented menace” derived from our growing technological powers and “from our reluctance to forgo perceived short-term advantages for the longer-term well-being of our species.” The first common enemy he identified was the burning of fossil fuels. Charbonneau observes that the hunt for extraterrestrial life has often been hindered by what she calls the “giggle factor.” But as “Mixed Signals” reminds us, the history of this esoteric quest is bound up with some of the most profound questions faced by the inhabitants of planet Earth. ♦
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