For alien hunters, the last couple of weeks have been a roller coaster ride. First there were tantalizing hints that so-called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) scattered across the deep sky tended towards integerized mathematical patterns. News of this remote possibility, in turn, created a minor news flap over whether these extragalactic microwave bursts might have some artificial (non-human) origin.

But John Learned, the second author of a paper that raised the specter of communicating aliens from cosmological distances in deep space, has since thrown cold water on the idea.

Germanys 100-meter Effelsberg radiotelescope which has also picked up Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) (AP Photo/Roland Weihrauch)

As I noted earlier in Forbes, most FRBs have been detected using Australias Parkes single-dish, 64-meter radio telescope and produce a single burst of pulsed radiation that is no longer than a few milliseconds.

Learned says they seem to originate from four or five different spots on the sky and points out that there are no repeated microwave pulses from the same direction. If we were getting a bunch of them from one direction then wed have to think more about that [being E.T.], said Learned.

He and colleagues are also basically ruling out a natural origin that they were some sort of colliding neutron star or highly engergetic type supernovae. Nor, they say, are such bursts likely to be galactic chirping from an exotic pulsar.

Most probably, says Learned, they are some sort of interference from government radar or satellite; maybe even reflected missile defense radio waves bouncing off the moon.

Even so, Learned admits that he and colleagues were initially spurred to do their FRB analysis to check if in fact these strange bursts could represent evidence of E.T.I.

The trouble is that any time you publish anything about [potential] E.T.I., said Learned, It gets sensationalized.

The real killer for their being intelligent signals is the association with the UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) integer second, says Learned. The comsos does not know nor care about our time unit of the second, said Learned. Nor does E.T., unless they are here in our terrestrial neighborhood and, even so, why would they?

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Bad Week For Alien Hunters