Recently the National Security Agency posted documents from their Technical Journal which had some interesting articles about extraterrestrials. Shortly after these documents were posted there were reports were posted across the internet that these documents were evidence that the NSA had received communication from extraterrestrials, an easy mistake to make with article titles such as “Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages.” These documents are actually related to exercises for practicing deciphering coded messages that extraterrestrials may send us in the future.
The recent NSA Technical Journal articles were actually obtained by UFO researchers in 2004, through freedom of information act requests. In the winter of 1966 issue of the journal, NSA cryptologist , Lambros D. Callimahos wrote an article titled, “Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” As a cryptologist, his interest was in the NSA’s ability to decipher any signals we might receive, and in his article he stated that, “once we receive a recognizable signal, we have a good chance of understanding the message.” He then goes into technical cryptological terms and discusses the different types of technology that they may be using to send signals, many of which we have not mastered. In the last portion of the article he gives an example of a hypothetical extraterrestrial message and discusses how to decipher the example, citing other similar exercises on deciphering hypothetical extraterrestrial messages.
Although these messages do not appear to be real extraterrestrial messages, Callimahos did have a strong interest in the subject. A declassified secret document on the NSA website titled, UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions, is a paper written by Callimahos in which he argues that the UFO phenomenon and possible extraterrestrial interaction should be taken much more seriously. He reviews how there are credible witnesses whose experiences cannot be written off.
“Having been UFO journalists for many years, we are able to shed more light on events such as these that appear to be something they’re not,” says Alejandro Rojas, investigative journalist for Open Minds Magazine. “While these documents may not be the smoking gun to show the NSA had extraterrestrial secrets that they are now revealing, it does provide an interesting look at the momentum that fueled the creation of SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).” This occurs less than a week after it was announced that the SETI Institute would no longer be receiving funding from two key donors – the state of California and the National Science Foundation forcing the institute to suspend operations of it Alien Telescope Array in California.
Open Minds has posted clarification to the confusion these documents have caused in the hopes of curbing the widespread false information currently spreading around the internet and to inform the public about the NSA’s early interest in extraterrestrials and UFOs.
