The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life
Some misunderstandings can be remedied by a simple explanation. Others end friendships or marriages. The most frightening miscommunications are those between nuclear-armed superpowers. In October, 1962, near the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean was shaken by depth charges from a U.S. ship. Convinced that he was under attack, the submarine’s captain decided to fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo. His deputy officer, whose consent was required, refused. He believed that the depth charges were not an attack but a signal, at a moment when the submarine was too deep underwater to receive radio transmissions. As it turned out, the deputy officer was correct: the submarine had missed an announcement that the U.S. Navy would “induce” any vessel violating a recently imposed blockade of sea traffic to surface and identify itself. The Soviet officer’s caution prevented escalation into nuclear war.
This incident, which opens “Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain,” by the science historian Rebecca Charbonneau, is just one of the Cold War’s many bloodcurdling close calls. This was an era obsessed with signals and surveillance, but terrible at direct communication. Enmity and mistrust made open dialogue between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. nearly impossible. Even when one side spoke frankly, the other searched for hidden agendas and ulterior motives. Yet, with nuclear arsenals on either side, the stakes had never been so high.
These tense geopolitical circumstances engendered hopes for another kind of superpower communication: the exchange of messages between Earth and advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. A year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union had sent the first human to outer space. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s voyage was the greatest victory to date in the U.S.-Soviet space race, the less antagonistic cousin of the arms race between the two countries. This international rivalry generated a series of unprecedented efforts to make contact with extraterrestrials, led by scientists who dreamed of harmony on Earth and beyond.
As Charbonneau shows, the Cold War quest for extraterrestrial intelligence was as much about communicating with other humans as it was about looking for aliens. When the Soviet Union sent the first Morse code message to Venus, in 1962, it used frequency manipulation to spell out the Russian word for “peace,” followed by “Lenin” and “USSR.” Venusians were unlikely to make much of such a sequence; the Americans, on the other hand, got the point. But scientists interested in conveying less political concepts often found their attempts stymied. Getting messages across the Iron Curtain could be just as hard as sending them into space.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence relied on radio astronomy, a subdiscipline that examines the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum—light whose wavelength is too long to be visible to human eyes. The field was founded by the physicist and radio engineer Karl Jansky, who, in 1933, was working at Bell Labs when he began searching for the source of static that was disrupting telephone conversations. He located it in an unexpected place: the middle of the Milky Way.
Jansky’s work marked the beginning of the serious scientific study of radio waves in outer space. But the field did not become a research priority in the United States until the Second World War, when it was highly valued for its usefulness in jamming radar systems. The Cold War was a boom time for radio astronomers, whose huge telescopes were prized for their ability to monitor enemy communications and track missiles. Flush with funds, the discipline advanced rapidly. This was the beginning of a long entanglement between astronomy, the military-industrial complex, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Radio astronomy was still a nascent technology, however, and the continued scarcity of high-tech instruments prompted surprising episodes of international coöperation. In 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik, the first human-made satellite to orbit Earth. Only one radar facility in the West, the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, had a telescope with a steerable parabolic dish large enough to track the rocket that had launched the satellite. This was a source of great alarm to the U.S., since the launch rocket resembled an intercontinental ballistic missile with enough power to carry a hydrogen bomb. As the Earth turned and the rocket moved out of Jodrell Bank’s view, the U.S. could not take up the baton—and neither could the Soviets, who soon asked for help finding their own rocket. For years, the British observatory was in the strange position of monitoring both American and Soviet missile launches and space missions.
In 1963, the physicist Bernard Lovell, who had developed Jodrell’s immense telescope, was invited on a visit to the U.S.S.R.’s new radio-astronomy facility in Crimea. Lovell had helped confirm a Soviet triumph by locating Sputnik’s rocket, and now he was a celebrity in the Soviet Union. His scientific curiosity must have been intense: he was to become the first Westerner to visit the new observatory and gauge the extent of Soviet advances in radio astronomy. As British intelligence made clear, he was also expected to report back on what he saw to MI6.
The Soviets, too, tried to draw Lovell into intrigue. In Moscow, near the end of Lovell’s trip, the president of the
Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.offered to build him a telescope even larger than the one at Jodrell Bank if he stayed in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a mysterious stranger had approached Lovell to ask for help arranging the defection of the brilliant, eccentric Iosif Shklovsky, a professor of astrophysics and a key figure in the Soviet space program. It was not clear to Lovell why Shklovsky might be in danger, and so he declined.
Caught in these political games, Lovell became intensely paranoid. He fell ill after returning to England, and grew convinced that the Soviets had made him sick by attempting to brainwash or even murder him, perhaps with the help of a telescope’s radar beam. He may have been influenced by the popular culture of the day: the film “The Manchurian Candidate” had come out the year before, featuring a plot that involved a Korean War veteran brainwashed by Communist captors and sent to assassinate the Presidential nominee of an American political party.
During the Cold War, the United States made a point of celebrating scientific freedom, but government-funded research was shaped by political priorities and new discoveries were swiftly put to military uses. In the Soviet Union, all research was completed under the auspices of the state. Scientific results that seemed to undermine the central tenets of Soviet politics had to be refuted, as, for example, when the field of classical genetics, with its emphasis on the determining powers of heredity, became taboo.
In the worst days of Stalin’s purges, in the nineteen-thirties, scientists had been among those arrested on trumped-up charges and imprisoned or executed. The “astronomers purge” began when an astronomy student failed his Ph.D. candidacy exam and denounced the professor who had administered the test. Under torture, the arrested astronomer confessed to a nonexistent counter-revolutionary conspiracy among his colleagues. An estimated ten to twenty per cent of the Soviet Union’s astronomers were swept up in the arrests that followed.
The political persecution of scientists continued after Stalin’s death, though with less lethal results. Those who spoke out in defense of human rights were often denied the privilege of travelling abroad. This was the case for Shklovsky, the physicist whom Lovell had been asked to help defect. In 1973, Shklovsky refused to sign a letter condemning Andrei Sakharov, a leading nuclear physicist turned human-rights defender, and wrote his own letter advocating for Sakharov. As a result, Shklovsky lost the right to attend international scientific meetings.
But ideology also gave the Soviets reason to believe in extraterrestrial civilizations, whose existence they hoped would unite the workers not only of the world but of the galaxy. In the nineteen-fifties, some Soviet astrobotanists argued that dialectical materialism dictated that extraterrestrial life must exist, since the absence of evidence of life on Mars or Venus would disprove communism’s philosophical basis. Such wishful thinking contributed to a dramatic false alarm, in 1962, when a Soviet reporter misunderstood a scientist’s remark and issued a telegram from the central news agency announcing that Soviet astronomers had received signals from outer space. The news caused a brief international sensation. After the announcement was debunked, the episode was used to discredit Soviet scientists, though it was the process of journalistic transmission that was most to blame.
Shklovsky was one of the leading figures in the Soviet search for extraterrestrial life. Known for both brilliant scientific advances and oddball theories, he repeatedly suggested that Phobos, one of Mars’s moons, was a hollow artificial satellite made by aliens. He was eager to share and debate his theories and findings with like-minded colleagues around the world—for instance, with the American astronomer Carl Sagan, perhaps the world’s highest-profile proponent of the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence. But, confined to the Soviet Union, Shklovsky struggled to communicate with his peers abroad. Mail to and from the U.S.S.R. was confiscated by the Soviets, and scientific results were heavily censored. Astronomers outside the U.S.S.R. had trouble confirming the findings of their Soviet counterparts, and legitimate discoveries were often dismissed by Westerners as hoaxes or errors.
Collaboration was even more fraught when astronomers and physicists were enlisted into spy games—a painful assignment for those who had sincere relationships with their colleagues and believed wholeheartedly in the objective nature of the scientific endeavor. In 1960, as a young man, Sagan met with a Soviet scientist visiting Los Angeles. After their meeting, Sagan was pumped for information by an Air Force intelligence officer masquerading as a translator. Eager to share his new discoveries, Sagan told the man everything, and was furious when he learned that he had been manipulated. The episode helped inspire Sagan’s vision of a search for extraterrestrial intelligence that would transcend national boundaries. He and his fellow radio astronomers, members of a discipline that lie at the heart of Cold War surveillance, dreamed of a better way of listening: one that promoted peace and coöperation rather than competition and subterfuge.
In 1971, scientists from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. hosted a joint conference on communication with extraterrestrial life which included discussion of building a radio telescope spanning the Israeli-Egyptian border. One hope in that era was that the search for extraterrestrial life could bring peace to the planet by allowing humans to perceive themselves as “earthlings” rather than citizens of different countries. Andrei Sakharov thought up a scheme that would send messages to extraterrestrials while also promoting nuclear disarmament: thermonuclear bombs could be detonated safely in space and double as “flashlamps” to transmit regular signals to aliens.
Détente, a process of softening U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations that Nixon initiated, was symbolized by the 1975 joint Apollo-Soyuz mission. In orbit, American and Soviet space capsules docked together. An American astronaut and a Soviet cosmonaut shook hands in space, and listened to the American rock-funk group War’s song “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” The Apollo blocked the Sun so that the Soyuz could photograph the solar corona. Before the mission, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had announced, “From outer space our planet looks even more beautiful. It is big enough for us to live peacefully on it.”
