Projects that began more than five decades ago and still continue to this day include efforts to evaluate bizarre sightings and exotic objects, scan the skies for signs of intelligent transmissions, and develop instruments capable of sniffing out signs of life on faraway worlds. The fact that the government chose to spend some cash on a supposedly scientific look at UFOs—particularly as they could be crucially related to national security threats—really should be no surprise, says Seth Shostak, one of the SETI Institute’s senior alien hunters.
1970s and ‘80s: CIA Investigations of Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena The 1970s and 1980s saw the CIA investigating a bunch of phenomena associated with UFO sightings, such as parapsychology and psychic happenings. According to CIA report “Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 (A Die-Hard Issue)”, “CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects.”
1976-1993: SETI/HRMS The only time the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has been written into a NASA budget line, this decade provided as much as $12 million a year for searches using the Arecibo and Goldstone antennas. Around 1990, the government’s SETI program—headquartered at NASA’s Ames Research Center—was renamed the High Resolution Microwave Survey in an attempt to avoid cancellation. Nevada senator Richard Bryan ended up cancelling the program anyway in 1993, right after actual observations had started.
1990s to now: NASA’s Astrobiology Institute Founded in 1998, the NASA Astrobiology Institute is one of many projects within the space agency aimed at investigating the possibility that life exists elsewhere in the cosmos. Scientists under its umbrella are currently thinking about whether life once existed on Mars, if there might be organisms tucked beneath the icy shells of the moons Europa and Enceladus, and how we would even recognize what life beyond Earth looks like if and when we see it. Now, and beyond.
Other ongoing work that continues to rely on federal funds includes developing instruments capable of detecting not only exoplanets but also alien biospheres, as well as work using organisms and environments on Earth as extraterrestrial analogs.