Jill Tarter: I would feel much more comfortable if one of the people you plan to speak to is Philip Klass. More to the point, Phil knows everybody in the business and because he made the study of UFOs a search to find credibility, he is aware of the foibles and lack of rigor and the downright lies that the majority of the people involved in this field perpetrate.
RT: Frank Drake referred to the lag time between capture and processing of data –
JT: For SETI-at-Home, yes. That’s not our project. That’s UC Berkeley. It’s an extraordinary exercise in distributed computing. We work very hard in our project at processing the data in real time so when something is there we can follow up on it.
RT: Has there ever been a second match?
JT: There is nothing that has successfully gotten through all the follow-up procedures we have done. Some signals for a while looked interesting but additional work has shown that they are not coming from a distant source moving in the sky at sidereal rates.
RT: How did you get into this?
JT: By accident. I started out in graduate school thinking about failed stars like brown dwarfs and things that were hard to find. It took 25 years before we actually found one. A secretary in the astronomy department told me I had gone from looking for things that were difficult to find to looking for things that were damned near impossible. So brown dwarfs were hard and extraterrestrial intelligence is harder still.
RT: How did you wind up as head of Project Phoenix?
JT: A fortunate accident, literally. My first year as a graduate school, I was supported as a research astronomer in programming the first mini-computer, the PDP-8. I learned how to program the thing and years later it was being thrown out as obsolete and was grabbed by Stu Boyer, an x-ray astronomer at Berkeley and he had a brilliant idea. His friend Jack Welch had a radio telescope at Hat Creek run by the department and we could do a piggyback experiment. One of the nice things about radio astronomy is you can take some of the data without hurting the astronomy, just put in more amplification and it never misses it, which isn’t true for optical – take some of the photons and you’re hosed. He said astronomers were looking at interesting places at interesting frequencies. Why don’t we try to see out there on their intermediate frequencies and analyze the data in ways that would look for artificial signals?
[break in tape]
RT: We search for signals according to our paradigms –
JT: Of course, we would love to get outside of our skins and think in a totally abstract way and ask, what is the best way to attempt to find evidence of a distant technology? But we can’t do that, we’re humans, and you can only conceive of what you can conceive of and do the best you can with the tools at hand. If those turn out not to be the correct tools, the strategy is to stay around long enough to figure out the right way to do it.
RT: Has your expectation or realistic hope changed over the course of the project in terms of what you would hope might happen? E.g. using radio, now optical?
JT: The hope has never been any different. There is a possibility that one of us might succeed in the not too distant future and that’s fantastic. In spite of forty years of effort, the amount of exploration we have actually done is very small so there’s no reason to draw any new conclusion on the basis of what we have done today. So it’s not time to get discouraged.
RT: Do you define success as finding a signal that is artificial? Or is it doing something beyond that, interpreting it?
JT: For me as an individual the first is quite enough. If were able to answer that question and realistically an answer can only be positive you can not prove a negative if we were to detect undeniable evidence, that would be pretty fantastic. I don’t go beyond that because I don’t have skills to go beyond that. That’s enough for me. In an abstract sense, that is success. For me in a personal sense success will come by establishing a funding mechanism so this sort of scientific exploration can continue. We did the experiment with a federal program, and something that is multi-generational is not suitable to the funding cycle of the Congress. The only example besides the church and tithing of institutions that have lasted a long time for the benefit of science are endowed like the Carnegie Institute. We’re working on it, but have not succeeded yet. We would like a couple of hundred million dollars. We think that’s a reasonable investment that would allow exploration to continue at a level that we’ll always be able to use new technology.
RT: There is perhaps funding available from Firmage or Bigalow –
JT: We have said thank you, but no thank you, to those two individuals.
RT: Drake mentioned that Allen and Myrvold are very protective of appropriate boundaries so you have integrity –
JT: Yes, credibility is our biggest asset.
RT: When a Mafioso offered money in the church one thought long and hard before saying no.
JT: And so we did. And we did say no.
RT: Why? Microsoft money is not “clean” money –
JT: They don’t support dubious projects which have the same kind of appearance in the public’s eye, such as Joe Firmage’s ridiculous science or his conclusion that the MJ-12 documents are correct and legitimate and real is much too close to home.
RT: He’s a young guy who is perhaps not a very clear thinker –
JT: He’s very charming and messianic.
RT: Does it have to be an American project?
JT: No, ideally it would be an international project. But the US has the history for philanthropy. It’s in our culture and our tax laws. It’s just more difficult to do it elsewhere, although we have funded projects in Italy and Australia and will continue to look. The SETI League out of New Jersey is trying to organize amateurs using backyard dishes. If they have five thousand dishes, they can look at the sky at all times and are better able to detect very strong but transient sources.
We’re building a new telescope, using emerging technologies to build an array of very small dishes, a world class instrument that is affordable and will allow us to search 24/7, joined with the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at Berkeley – the R&D phases has been funded by Paul Allen. with a smaller contribution from Nathan Myrvold. That’s big and exciting and taking up our time around here, and we’re looking at a next generation telescope to do the project that the SETI League has started on, but the problem is , how do you build a telescope to do a radio flyby and look in all directions at all times on all frequencies with reasonable sensitivity, looking for that class of signal that is transient? We’re supporting the optical SETI work, we had a workshop two years ago looking ahead 20 years and chose optical SETI. Looking for pulses in the optical that last only a nanosecond.
RT: Why is there not more public support?
JT: Our only conversations with the government revolve around something a hundred times bigger than the array we’re building. For the past decade, the international community has been trying to figure out how to build a square kilometer array. A million square meters of collecting area. We could do it today but if we built radio telescopes as we have in the past we couldn’t afford it. Lots of people around the world are thinking about different technologies. The Allen telescope is one way to make this happen. Because we’re thinking of such a large array, we have told NASA they should have a square kilometer array in their future. They are doing more missions – faster, better, cheaper – and to communicate with ground you either have to put a large radio telescope on the spacecraft to have the gain or you have to put the gain on the ground. They’re maxed out now with their 70 meter antennas and their arrays of 34 meters with all of the traffic they can bear. To put a million square meters of collecting it doesn’t take hardly any onboard power or weight to get the signal back down because all of the gain is on the ground. We’re working with people at JPL and DSM to develop a public/private partnership. Nobody wants to get into the position again where we are at the mercy of this annual funding cycle. If we succeed, there will be funding for the next stages.
RT: Have there been objections from religious organizations?
JT: Certainly from the fundamentalist religions that know beyond a doubt because their bible tells them that the earth was built in six days and there’s only one earth. In terms of the major religions, we have had some religious scholars do papers asking what the detection of an extraterrestrial technology would do to the tenets of the religions, and there’s no indication that there’s any contradiction. The church would manage to portray it as just another manifestation of God’s abilities. It came down to the dogma that man is in the image of God and extraterrestrial intelligence would be another form of that.
RT: What’s your hunch? That the universe is teeming with life? How rare is life?
JT: I don’t know the answer to that, that’s why I’m trying to do the experiments. I wouldn’t work on a project that has no chance of success. From what I know of the universe we inhabit it is quite possible that life and intelligent life exists elsewhere. Everything I have learned since I was a graduate student enhances that possibility rather than decrease it in spite of the “rare” thesis. We just don’t know and it would be foolish not to look because there is a possibility.
RT: Intuitively, my sense is that the likelihood is lots of life.
JT: There is a way of counting in physics that I am persuaded to, which is one, two … infinity. Whenever we find a phenomena, at least in astrophysics, when we find a new phenomenon, with the first example thereof we don’t know if it’s unique or singular. However, the moment you find a second example you know that it’s in fact everywhere. I think that’s probably the way it is with intelligent life. Either we’re alone or they’re out there. Number two is pretty important.
RT: Do people think you’re Jodie Foster and ask who the “blind guy” is?
JT: They do, and the blind guy is Kent Cullers, my colleague. No one could be more flattered than to have Jodie Foster playing a role that they were associated with. I have nothing but respect for her talents.
RT: Let me ask a UFO question. Recounted the story of “we chase them and can’t catch them.” Others say the same kind of thing, that regardless of the charlatans and the crazies – some, including people in the intelligence community – who know how to use the phenomena as cover and deception –say that we rely on knowing the people speaking to us, having a credible report of something, as pilots I have known have. Do you know Richard Haines from NASA?
JT:I do know him. I have worked with him at Ames and talked with him and I don’t think he’s a very critical thinker. I think he’s a muddled thinker.
RT: Have you heard stories like the one I told?
JT: Yes, I have heard stories, no I have never actually seen the data and the first-hand reports or talked to the individuals themselves. But I have seen a UFO in my airplane, my husband saw it too. It’s the reason I am so skeptical. We were flying back to Concord at night and saw what we thought was an aircraft very close coming toward us so we asked the Center what was there and they said nothing is there. Yet we saw it, we looked at it and said, this can’t be happening to us, and it took 3-4 minutes before clouds we didn’t know were there rearranged themselves and we realized what we saw was a small piece of the moon. But before that understanding, there was no way we could do anything but interpret the data our eyes were gathering as another aircraft or something.
RT: But you would distinguish between something unidentified and something you did identity- you did identify it as the moon and so it’s not a UFO by definition and many alleged sightings are also identified as meteorological phenomena, mistaken identification, planets –
JT: Or they’re not. There are many reports and you know this as well as I do that are unknown, never given a satisfactory explanation. That doesn’t mean they necessarily have anything to do with little green men in space ships. They are simply unexplained phenomena.
RT: You’re right, we can simply not link those reports to extraterrestrials. But say vehicle interference cases – where someone not in an airplane at night but on the ground reports an identifiable object and the car stopped and there were physical effects.
JT: Have you seen the data? Have you seen the physical traces? I have to come down on – it’s not showing up. No one has an ashtray from a space craft that they can put in your hand. The data is not yet there. There may be some day. It may turn out that phenomena that we currently don’t understand are being caused by physical visitations, but the data aren’t there. Until the data show up –
RT: The data would be an undeniable physical effect.
JT: I want something that can not be explained in any other way. That is tangible, observable, and not analyzed by just a few. Whatever happens to those implants that are taking out of people, they’re not – well, never mind. I don’t think it’s as credible as the data that we deal with on a daily basis in science.
RT: Yes, implants disappear or turn out to be tissue. But how would you go about it, if you found someone that tells a credible story, a rural person, tells a credible story of a sighting, burn marks, and physical material left after landing. What procedure would you use to get that material into a process that would enable it to be evaluated? in accordance with your standards?
JT: I would call up the nearest community college and talk to a biologist, anybody with a scientific background, and ask them to come out and document the physical evidence and curate it so that it could be examined by experts.
RT: How would you safeguard the material?
JT: I can’t treat it any differently than I would treat anything else, which is, make it as available to as many experts as I could as quickly as possible.
RT: To have as much data in the public domain, verified and redundant.
JT: Yes. And if you ever hear an announcement from this institute, you can be assured that the discovery data and anything we base our conclusions on will be fully accessible.
January 15, 2001