Extraterrestrial

Could old SETI data contain missed evidence of alien signals?

By T.K. Randall
July 28, 2026

Image: OVRO 40 Meter Radio Telescope
Credit: Salvor Hardin / CC BY-SA 4.0 (adapted) For decades now, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been scouring the cosmos for any sign that we are not alone - a search that has so far come up empty.

Traditionally, the search has focused on a particular narrow range of frequencies (known as the "water hole"), but in more recent years there has been a shift toward analyzing signals beyond this range.

"For decades, SETI searches have concentrated on a relatively small part of the radio spectrum," said study lead author and astronomer Louisa Mason of the University of Manchester.

"We wanted to ask what might happen if we looked somewhere very different."Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this change in focus is that the enormous amounts of data already collected by SETI over the years may already contain evidence of such signals.

In other words, we may have already detected an alien signal and have simply missed it.

"The millimetre and submillimetre radio bands remain almost completely unexplored for SETI, so this is really about opening up a new area of parameter space to search," said Mason.

In the near future, AI analysis could make it easier to scour huge amounts of data for such signals and reveal something that may have been staring us in the face all along.

Then again, it's also possible that there may simply be nothing there to find.

Source: Gizmodo

Tags: SETI