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289 The research team that found hints of life in a Mars rock deliberately kept news about their work from NASA managers to prevent premature leaks. They commented later that the way to handle a truly exciting dis- covery is not spelled out in any simple set of rules, so scientists attempt to deal with the situation on a case-by-case basis.*! Military or intelligence organizations that serendipitously discover sug- gestive evidence may hold that information even more tightly. In July 1967, the Department of Defense’s Vela 4 satellites detected a brief, intense flash of gamma-ray photons coming not from a nuclear test, but from outer space. The data were not analyzed until March 1969 and were only announced to the astronomical community in 1973—a 6-year delay.” Now we call them gamma-ray bursters. According to writer and editor Randall Fitzgerald, reports of signals from space in the late 1950s were taken seriously by officials of the Central Intelligence Agency because they had been passed on by the National Security Agency. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti reportedly said that people at the NSA were genuinely puzzled; they thought that the signals were real and intelligent in origin, but did not know what to make of them or what to do with them.** Given this history, we must be realistic. A detection made by persons working for a governmental agency or under a government contract may not be made public for some time. Officials might delay or limit the release of information while the discovery is confirmed, and to allow time for a policy discussion. We cannot assume the inevitability of a leak; some secrets still are kept. Allen Tough identified reasons why governments may try to keep a detection secret: the belief that people might panic; the fear of a negative impact on religion, science, and other aspects of culture; concern that false alarms may cause embarrassment; the temptation to seek national and individual competitive advantage; avoiding a harmful premature reply; seeking a trade or military advantage; the fear of an extraterrestrial Trojan horse.™* In the case of an information-rich contact, political and governmental leaders may think that they need to prepare the public for the news. If they were concerned about the impact on their societies, they might let through only information that they considered safe. Donald Tarter predicted that security agencies would require signal monitoring, information manage- ment, and a voice in policy with regard to a reply. Nobelist Wald foresaw a more extreme result: Contact would produce the most highly classified and exploited information in the history of the Earth.* Even Drake, who favors open release of a confirmed detection, recog- nized that if the signal is information-rich, “you’d better take a close look at the information to see if it would appear threatening to anyone, and make a judgement as to just what you say.” Every government will realize that there is possibly very valuable information to be gained, useful for Everything Will Be Made Public