A Bit Of History

Although some UFO advocates know this.Some may not.Here is an oldie but goodie..

"Attempts to Contact Aliens Date Back More Than 150 Years
By By Michael Schirber
Astrobiology Magazine
posted: 29 January 2009
8:50 am ET

The desire to contact intelligent life on other planets is much older than the UFO craze and the SETI movement. Several 19th century scientists contemplated how we might communicate with possible Martians and Venusians.

These early proposals - which predate by 150 years the first extraterrestrial message that was sent in 1974 - were based on visual signals, as the invention of radio was still decades away.

In fact, as history shows, ideas for interplanetary communication have largely been driven by whatever the current technology allowed - be it lamps, radios or lasers.

"You go with what you know," said Steven Dick, NASA Chief Historian.

Are we alone?

Over two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks argued over the existence of life on other planets, but the idea really took off after the Copernican revolution.

"Once it was realized that all the planets go around the sun, it was not hard to imagine that the other planets could be like Earth," Dick said.

Galileo, Kepler and others considered the inhabitability of the planets, while being careful not to upset Church authority.

"The idea blossomed in the 17th century into the 'plurality of worlds' debate, but it remained controversial," said Dick, who has written several books on the topic.

One of the most influential proponents for extraterrestrial life was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who wrote Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in 1686.

Despite the interest, there was no recorded discussion of how we might locate or contact these potential aliens until more than a century later.

Crop triangles and burning canals

Florence Raulin-Cerceau of the Alexandre Koyré Center in Paris has documented the early attempts at communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI), or what is now often called active SETI.

"As early as the 19th century, inventors imagined "sky telegraph" equipment to communicate with the supposed inhabitants of the solar system's planets," Raulin-Cerceau recently wrote with her colleague in the French magazine Pour la Science.

The first of these inventors was Carl Friedrich Gauss, the German mathematician. In the 1820s, he spoke of reflecting sunlight towards the planets with his land surveying invention, the heliotrope. He is also credited with the idea of cutting a giant triangle in the Siberian forest and planting wheat inside.

"The size and color contrast should have made the object visible from the moon or Mars, and the geometric figure could only be interpreted as an intentional construction," Raulin-Cerceau wrote.

Twenty years later, the astronomer Joseph von Littrow came up with a similar idea to pour kerosene into a 30-kilometer-wide circular canal that would be lit at night to signal our presence. "

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