Scientists hunting for extraterrestrial life believe alien civilisations may indeed be attempting to contact Earth, but turbulent conditions in space are scrambling their messages before they reach us.
Fresh research from the Silicon Valley-based SETI Institute, which receives partial funding from Nasa, proposes that cosmic weather phenomena could explain why decades of listening for signals from other worlds have yielded nothing.
The study, released this week in the Astrophysical Journal, suggests that solar storms and plasma turbulence emanating from stars near potential transmitting planets distort radio communications travelling through space.
Much like ET's famous difficulties trying to "phone home" in Steven Spielberg's 1982 film, any extraterrestrial broadcasts may simply be getting lost in translation during their journey across the cosmos.
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According to the institute's researchers, stellar activity causes ultra-narrow radio signals to broaden, dispersing their power across multiple frequencies.
This spreading effect renders traditional narrowband detection methods far less effective.
SETI astronomer Vishal Gajjar, who co-authored the report with research assistant Grayce C Brown, claimed that if a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below detection thresholds.
"Even if it's there", she said, "potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in technosignature searches".
Alien signals could be being blocked by stormy space weather, new research suggests | GETTYThe study identifies what scientists describe as an "overlooked complication" in the search for intelligent life.
Fluctuations in plasma density within stellar winds, along with violent events such as coronal mass ejections, can warp radio waves close to their source, effectively smearing the signal's frequency and diminishing the peak strength that detection systems depend upon.
The research team reached their conclusions by measuring how stellar activity affects radio transmissions from spacecraft within our own solar system, then applying those findings to conditions around distant stars.
Grayce C Brown explained the discovery necessitates a fundamental shift in how scientists approach the hunt for alien life, including monitoring at higher frequencies during future observation campaigns.
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"By quantifying how stellar activity can reshape narrowband signals, we can design searches that are better matched to what actually arrives at Earth, not just what might be transmitted," she said.
For decades, SETI and other organisations have scanned the stars seeking frequency spikes that would be unlikely to occur through natural astrophysical processes, hoping to identify deliberate transmissions from non-human intelligence.
The question of whether humanity is alone in the universe remains one of civilisation's most enduring puzzles, fuelling countless conspiracy theories and films about unidentified flying objects, now officially termed unexplained anomalous phenomena.
The alleged remains of an alien lifeform discovered in 2023
|REUTERS
A Government report from 2024 documented more than 750 fresh UAP sightings between May 2023 and June of that year.
Barack Obama sparked renewed interest in the existence of aliens last month when he declared on a podcast that aliens "were real", before swiftly retracting the statement on social media, claiming he had been swept up in the interviewer's enthusiasm.
The former president's comments prompted Donald Trump to announce plans to declassify all government records concerning aliens, UFOs and UAP.
"I don't know if they're real or not," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.