SETI Success?

 

Prof. Simon Holland has come up on HPANWO before, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2022/02/skeptic-copium.html. Since I wrote that article two years ago, this contradictory Scottish science vlogger has taken an even stranger turn, one that makes me wonder what on earth is he playing at? As I have said in my SETI talks, the biggest problem the movement faces is not data gathering but processing. Electronic noise of every frequency, wavelength and amplitude is constantly pouring into our radio telescope antennas to be stored on tapes and disks until somebody can find the time to sift through it all and see if it contains anything organized. This is why SETI@Home was a creative and effective way of clearing the vast backlog. It allowed everybody with a home PC to join in. Officially no confirmed candidate signal was ever found; but according to Prof Holland, that's not true. What happened was an Italian group had the idea of rechecking the SETI@Home data blocks for Doppler shift, a test that hadn't been done before; this revealed whether a radio source is moving relative to the receiver in terms of distance. This will inevitably happen on one level because the earth is moving; rotating every day and orbiting the sun once per year. Therefore the tests had to control for that; but afterwards they then discovered that one radio source was still Doppler shifting in the same way, which can only mean it is coming from an exoplanet orbiting its own star. As a result various SETI projects are being escalated with massively increased funding and new telescopes are being built. It is run by the EU and not the USA, which is the original heartland of SETI. Prof. Holland says he found this out from somebody whom he called "the source of this information". That is an unbelievable thing for a skeptic to say. It is the kind of thing the skeppers constantly castigate us woo-woos for. This source told Simon that the EU run network has found a modulated signal, exactly the thing SETI proponents have been looking for since the days of Drake and Sagan. The scientists involved have resolved information from this transmission. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FSkiLqLx60 and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUTDRvnv0VY.
 
Why don't we all know about this? Apparently, according to Prof. Simon Holland's source, the scientists don't want to publish too soon; they want to wait until they're a hundred percent certain. However, as I say in my SETI talk, see background link below, you can't keep something like this secret; the conspiracy would be too top-heavy. The telescope network stretches from Manchester to Namibia; it involves a huge number of people constantly communicating. A leak would be unavoidable. Not only that, but the evidence they are examining doesn't come from a pile of debris in a paddock sealed off by the military police, it is right above our heads where we can all see it. Astronomy is the one true democratic science. You cannot have cover-ups in astronomy. Therefore I doubt the content of these two videos very much. So what is going on? Is somebody pulling Holland's leg or is he pulling ours? If so why? It could be an attempt to muddy the waters in the rising public awareness of UFO's. SETI is a totally superfluous enterprise when you consider what these multi-million pound instruments are looking for in distant galaxies is actually here on earth already and sometimes flying just a few feet above our heads. However, these confusion techniques often backfire very badly. I double-checked and confirmed that Holland did not upload these videos on April the 1st. Perhaps he is simply quitting skeptic YouTube with a bang; or maybe he has just had a mental breakdown. We'll see.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/12/ben-emlyn-jones-at-awakecon-2017.html.