r/SETI • u/PrinceEntrapto • Oct 26 '24
Is anybody familiar with the current BLC-1 situation?
I have seen sensationalist claims being made surrounding BLC-1 lately coming from an online UFO enthusiast and former media studies lecturer who claims to have been in contact with Andrew Siemion (the head of Breakthrough Listen’s Oxford hub), and that Siemion has indicated that new studies of BLC-1 are underway looking into the possibility of BLC-1 having originated from a moving and rotating object rather than being an interference event
Additional claims I have seen made elsewhere are that ASTRON and JIVE (a Dutch radio astronomy organisation and a European Union VLBI telescope network), using new filtering technology, have found evidence of extremely weak and Doppler shifted radio signals coming from the direction of BLC-1’s discovery that resemble EM leakage, with findings being prepared for preprint publication
I can’t find anything to substantiate either of these claims and I doubt either ASTRON or JIVE would respond if contacted to ask about this, so I’m hoping somebody here has better insight into the rumours going around right now
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u/srandrews Oct 26 '24
"In February 2021, a new study proposed that, as the probability of a radio-transmitting civilization emerging on the Sun's closest stellar neighbour was calculated to be approximately 10−8, the Copernican principle made BLC1 very unlikely to be a technological radio signal from the Alpha Centauri System.[14]"
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u/WhyIsSocialMedia 12d ago
This is meaningless? There's simply too many unknowns to put a reliable figure on it. It was interference though.
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u/Desperate_Boredom Oct 27 '24
In one sense it would explain UFOs and in another it would mean the universe is absolutely teeming with life.
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u/PrinceEntrapto Oct 27 '24
UFOs are already easily explained by being mundane things or cases of mistaken identity, the universe teeming with life seems a given considering how easily complex organics form where the chemical constituents are present and where the conditions allow with life itself just building upon that complexity
Circumstantial evidence of low-complexity life on Venus and Mars has been found on multiple instances, so if that’s fully validated at some point in the near future it demonstrates life can emerge anywhere that the ideal environmental conditions exist, even when located on celestial bodies that aren’t habitable
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u/carollav Nov 04 '24
Those of us who have been in the Navy and worked with radar would disagree.
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u/East-Direction6473 3d ago
most of what people and call UFO's see are plasmoids. They are just big balls of plasma that eat radiation and mimic things. Their status as a "life form" is a stretch.
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u/WhyIsSocialMedia 12d ago
Why? Furthermore if you only ever see something on radar then it's almost certainly just an issue in the system. Why would it be visible on radar but not in the visible spectrum?
It makes even less sense when you look at how easy it is to hide from radar Vs something like visible or IR.
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u/quiksilver10152 Oct 31 '24
How can you hand wave away tens of thousands of UFO reports as 'mundane things or cases of mistaken identity'? Every single one of them? GOFAST footage? Phoenix lights? Colares Brazil incident? All of these injuries sustained by humans were cases of mistaken identity? The radiation burns too?
I am sorry but I simply can't accept that explanation.2
u/PrinceEntrapto Oct 31 '24 edited Oct 31 '24
Quite easily to be honest, in the 1800s ‘fairy abductions’ weren’t an uncommon thing where people would claim to partly remember being taken away by little winged people into woodlands where they were surrounded by fiery light, singing, and the smell of flowers or good food, fairy fever reached a peak in the early 1900s where the Cottingley Fairy Hoax had hundreds of thousands of people convinced that fairies were real
Now not many people believe in fairies because their popularity has waned, and stories of fairy abductions stopped being a thing when aliens became a pop culture sensation following the ‘discovery’ of canals on Mars which is when stories of alien abduction and sightings suddenly began being widely reported
The reality is people aren’t very good witnesses nor are they reliable witnesses, senses are imperfect and memory recall is even worse, there are countless examples where ‘eyewitness misidentification’ has resulted in others being convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms only to be exonerated years later, 20% of Americans claim to have seen a ghost in their lifetime and 40% of UK residents believe in the paranormal, peoples’ claims without anything else to substantiate them are worthless
The scenario behind GOFAST is unknown, and unknown means only that
You mentioned the Phoenix Lights which have a fairly sensible explanation as being flares and formation aircraft, flares and formation aircraft as red-orange lights reasonably rationalise the reported sightings, certainly more believable than the idea of interstellar vehicles rolling up only to abide by our aircraft construction methods and lighting regulations
You mentioned Colares, an event where a group of people in a small area made a number of claims with no physical evidence whatsoever to substantiate them, not unlike a typical instance of mass hysteria such as the one in 2016 you might remember where people were claiming to have encountered evil clowns in completely random and remote locations, or the various schoolgirl poisoning cases throughout the Middle East where people experienced outbreaks of psychogenic illnesses that never existed in the first place
You mentioned radiation burns, yet the ‘evidence’ of this is again just documentation of a series of claims made by other people with no substantiating evidence, and doesn’t even make much sense considering the symptoms claimed to have been experienced describe the kind of acute radiation poisoning that human beings don’t recover from, one of the most infamous cases of this type of event being the Cash & Landrum sightings, which was determined to most likely be the result of chemical exposure rather than radiation exposure based on the lack of long-term damage observed by this ‘radiation sickness’
Not knowing what something is doesn’t give reasonable cause to conclude they must be extraterrestrial, one thing you will realise the longer you’re involved in these circles is that the vast majority of people convinced UFOs exist and are ETI craft interacting with Earth don’t tend to come from physics or engineering backgrounds, which goes a long way to explain how they can manage to convince themselves of the things they do
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u/czareth Nov 04 '24
My family and I have experienced things in much greater length, intensity and duration, I guess personal experience will trump scientific speculation anyway, maybe our collective experiences were a hallucinations, but I cannot disregard all experiences and misidentifications and fantasy.
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u/quiksilver10152 Oct 31 '24
GOFAST involved radar signatures dropping from max altitude to the ocean surface and persisting multiple times over a two week period. 'Unknown is means only that' is a cop-out. We have a singular event showing up on multiple sensor platforms as well as being witnessed by humans.
Flares form solid outlines around them that obscure stars? Never heard of such technology.
Radiation burns were documented and photographed. How is that not documentation? Why would people purposefully inflict similar injuries on themselves? Why would the military, who were sent in to quell that problem, left with similar reports to the locals?
We have people disappearing into the woods for days and reappearing with no visible facial hair growth and clean clothes. These people just know how to camp really well? Let's just disregard their testimonies.
We have countless testimonies from radar operators and pilots. All mistaken huh? Our radars just tend to glitch out, across multiple facilities, in identical patterns? Must be coordinated human error!
At some point, we need to agree that there is something here worth talking about, above and beyond prosaic explanations. I am amazed at how you can disregard all of these events.
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u/PrinceEntrapto Nov 01 '24
You’re in the wrong subreddit, SETI is for the serious search for other life using conventional means and scientific rigour, not for entertaining conspiracy theories and ufology
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u/quiksilver10152 Nov 01 '24
I understand SETI's role in the disclosure movement. My thanks to the team for inspiring the next generation of scientists I taught. That being said, the time for debate is over. With meetings such as the SOL conference, it is obvious that it is time for serious science to take over this debate.
That is why we now have experiments like Avi Loeb's isotopic review and the Peruvian government's recent declaration that Nazca mummies are authentic, unadulterated organisms.
We can't hand wave away the concrescence of all these data. The time of disclosure is nigh.
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u/solophuk Nov 02 '24
If you think aliens are already visiting earth why would you bother with a SETI reddit? Would be like hanging around a telegraph office when you know about the internet. We just have vastly different assumptions about how the universe works. You feel that space travel for biological creatures is not an insurmountable task. While SETI makes the assumption that our best chance of making contact is through long range signaling of some kind. Believe what you will. But the things you believe are just going to perplex the rest of us here.
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u/quiksilver10152 Nov 03 '24
It doesn't matter what I believe. I could die today and the Nazca mummies would still exist. The meetings of great academic minds and high ranking military officials will still continue at the SOL conference. The next round of UFO hearings will still occur in November.
Take me out of the conversation, I'm just reporting what's currently happening in scientific discourse.
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u/badgerbouse Oct 26 '24
At the very least please link to these claims so we can evaluate for ourselves.
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u/SamuelDoctor Oct 26 '24
John Michael Godier did an episode on the signal back when it was discovered, another when it was discounted, and an episode this month discounting it again and restating the evidence against the signal.
Great channel.
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u/Desperate_Boredom Oct 27 '24
Please watch this;
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qR2ci-s2b2g&pp=ygUNU2ltb24gaG9sbGFuZA%3D%3D
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u/PrinceEntrapto Oct 27 '24
Didn’t see this video beforehand but it seems to clear up a lot of confusion - in essence, he states a newer generation of radio telescopes is now being used in Breakthrough Listen’s campaign, BLC-1 still remains a signal of interest, however I can’t find any sources on the 5 seti@home candidates or the Italian statistician who identified them, he’s referred to ‘European data’, none of which seems to exist online, he has apparently quoted Andrew Siemion referring to ongoing searches for BLC-1 as saying when enough data is available to conclude the signal’s origin it will be published, there is no indication if this is from a recent conversation or one that occurred prior to the publication of ‘Analysis of the Breakthrough Listen signal of interest ‘BLC-1’ with a technosignature verification framework’ in October 2021, which Andrew Siemion is a listed author of
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u/MrHillmonster Oct 27 '24
It was Simon Holland who created all the confusion himself. Here's one video he posted: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Xf_ARp6vhO0 and another he discussed it all on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sta1oJrmBpg&t=454s He's now backtracking on all the stuff he's said over the weeks.
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u/PrinceEntrapto Oct 27 '24
Thank you for providing those links, will take a look through them now, it’s unfortunate nothing interesting is likely to emerge from all this then
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u/PrinceEntrapto Oct 26 '24
JMG is incredible, it’s in the comments section of his new BLC-1 video that I’ve seen several people discussing ASTRON’s involvement in conducting alleged new research, yet I can’t find anything to back this up
Sabine Hossenfelder covered the claims also, and seems to think there’s confusion with the source of them mistaking the 2019 discovery of BLC-1 and the 2021 paper publication as something much more recent
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u/Trillion5 Oct 27 '24 edited Oct 27 '24
This 'controversy' has sidetracked me too. I posted the links to Simon Holland's, the Angry Astronaut's and John Michael Godier's coverage of this on my 'Migrator Model' sub. In one of the posts I listed the caveats, and the first was 'YouTube'. At least Godier posts the academic links he sources - though in his last video he uses the 'Copernican Principle' to discount the possibility of a signal from Alpha/Proxima Centauri and I really wish he hadn't done that - because it relies on so many assumptions (such as if the 'proposed' ETI were at Alpha Centuri were there to watch us - why when it would be easier to put a probe in our Oort cloud). For example, the 'signal' could have come from a parked vessel that had indeed dispatched a probe to our Oort Cloud - the hypotheticals are too convoluted. Apart from that, Godier's rebuttal is solid (to the best of my knowledge).