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288 Ifand when interspecies contact is made. . . . it may be that we shall encoun- ter ideas, philosophies, ways and means not previously conceived by the minds of men. If this is the case, the present program of research will quickly pass from the domain of scientists to that of powerful men and institutions. aAe the public almost instantly. Horowitz thought it would be impossible to keep any such signal classified, because in the process of verifying it, it is necessary to have scientists at other observatories look at the same place in the sky, just to make sure that you’re not seeing an artifact of your own observatory. People who are in on the world’s greatest discovery are not going to sit on it.” In fact, scientists have sat on information about important discoveries. In 1967, Cambridge University astronomers detected powerful pulsing signals that may have been the most suggestive of an extraterrestrial intel- ligent origin that had ever been detected in all the history of radio astron- omy. Instead of calling BBC or the London Times, the discoverers withheld their results for months while they considered possible explanations, includ- ing the idea that this might be evidence of an alien civilization. Their caution proved to be justified; the signals were from a previously unknown type of astronomical object called a pulsar.*° Cold War Scenarios In his novel The Black Cloud, Fred Hoyle envisioned that scientists communicating with the alien entity would operate from an estate sur- rounded by armed guards and cut off from the outside world. This may have been inspired by Bletchley Park, where British code-breakers ana- lyzed German communications during World War II. The film “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) portrayed a fictional situ- ation in which Americans discover an alien artifact while exploring the Moon. The Americans invent a cover story (disease) to prevent access to their base by Soviet personnel. Such a cover story would work only if American authorities also kept their own public in the dark. As the Annex to this book explains, there was a NASA document pro- viding detailed guidance on how to announce the detection of extrater- restrial intelligence that might be found by the short-lived official search. This tightly controlled procedure, which was designed to prevent announce- ments that later proved to be mistaken, implied a certain amount of delay. Assumptions: After Contact Everything Will Be Made Public —John C. Lilly, 1961** SETI researchers tend to assume that a detection will become known to